


Disinfect the Site of Injury

by Barkour



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Bad Medical Care, Blood and Injury, Burns, F/M, Unresolved Romantic Tension, non-canon magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 09:41:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17722754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: Jester takes a hit in a fight, and Caleb's the one who treats her.





	Disinfect the Site of Injury

Like so:

The demon, the dagger, the flash of something obscene beyond sight in the air, Jester’s cry of pain mingled too with rage, the door that opened wrongly as he ran – a fool – into her. 

They fell together. The room had changed. He tasted the acid-sharp strangeness of that _other_ world; then it had gone, and Jester groaned as he landed on top of her. A door, a true door, a wood door slatted together with iron, stood between them and the rest of the fight. The hellhounds would scent them soon.

“I’m sorry, let me see it—”

“It’s fine, I’m okay—”

“You are not okay—”

He drew her upright as she protested. Heavily, Jester leaned against him. Her fingers splayed across her side, beneath her bosom. An overbright ichor did not well but ooze between her fingers, now faster, now thicker. 

“Okay,” said Jester, “maybe I’m not okay. What did that stupid demon even do?”

“That wasn’t the demon did this. I think it was the warlock—”

Jester declared, “Well, I’m going to kick both of their asses,” and under her tongue she made small utterance, the familiar sussuring half-word that preceded a mass heal; only—

There was no tang taste in the back of Caleb’s nose. His skin did not prickle, the hairs coming to a point. Jester looked sickly at him but not at him, through him, at a point given only to her wide and widening eyes.

“Traveler?” she said in a little voice. “Are you there?”

Caleb moved quickly. He pulled her hand from her chest. The ichor guttered out in a wet and noisy wave. Jester cursed and punched at the floor. The floorboards creaked but held. 

“If you’re playing a trick it’s a very funny one! Ha ha ha!” Her voice strained. Her hair had come half out of its tidy bun through the fight and the jump through the dimensional gate. “So now the joke’s over and you can help me.”

Drawing his dagger Caleb said, “Forgive me this, Jester,” and he gripped the ripped dress in his fist and using the dagger tore the cloth from her side. 

“C’mon, you dick!”

“I am sorry,” he said, not sorry, “but it is in the way.” The wound was worse. He had expected such. The flesh had curdled away from the gash.

It was evident she had not meant Caleb. “Traveler, okay, I get the joke now! You have to answer me!” Jester said, angrier, and also more frightened, every one of her emotions flashing out across her face with such clarity that Caleb—well. His gut ached. Fear did not suit her face. She did not show such things.

“Jester, look at me.” Caleb touched her chin with two fingers. She turned those huge lantern-like eyes on him. Her tail lashed behind her. “You are hyperventilating. Will you let me treat this wound?”

Her teeth showed. She said, “You’re not… you don’t have healing.”

His fingers had smudged blood and soot on her chin. He said, “No. I don’t. What I mean to do if you will let me is to cauterize the wound. Without examining the warlock’s books I can’t be sure, but… There is a lizard, they say, in Xhorhas, the ysalamir. And its blood is a poison that can, I don’t know how to say this. Crush magic. For a time.”

Her breathing was rapid, but slowing as she blinked and thought.

“So it’s… You don’t think the Traveler has—” Her cheeks were still wet.

“No,” said Caleb, with neither sincerity nor dishonesty. “I don’t think he has.”

“And you’re going to burn me.”

Purposefully getting it wrong he said, “You’re a tiefling, yes?”

For the effort, Jester smiled and wrinkled her nose like she might laugh; ah, but she only said, “I’m not like those tieflings, you know. I’m a one of a kind.”

“Yes,” said Caleb, “you are that,” and as she was still smiling at him he hooked his thumbs together, pressed them into her side, and cast burning hands.

Jester screamed in infernal, a thing that went on and on and blistered his ears with cold, a cold like the worst of the winters he’d survived as a child, the winter that killed the sister in his mother as they mixed dirt with their loaf of bread and ate moss for sustenance. As she screamed, Jester clutched at Caleb’s back. Her fist wrenched his coat. His shoulder, too, yelled. 

As quickly as that it was done. He pulled his hands away. Cruel imprints of his fingers remained. Jester was crying, tears that left frost lines on her face as she said, “ _Fuck_ you, Caleb, you _jerk_ , you _bastard_ ,” and clutched at him.

“I know this too,” said Caleb. He pulled the ravaged ends of her dress together and used a mending to stitch the threads together again. Reaching to hold her by the waist, he helped Jester to stand. 

“You asshole,” she said with feeling.

“Yes,” said Caleb.

“You mean—nasty—puppy kicker,” she hiccupped.

“I have never kicked Nugget,” said Caleb.

“I’m very mad with you,” Jester wailed, “and I’m going to put so many spiders into your coffees and your beers too and your books.”

“That’s fine, I like spiders,” said Caleb.

“You _would!_ ” she snapped, and as they at last winced to the door she leaned her brow briefly to his shoulder and said, “Thank you. But I still hate you.”

“That’s okay,” said Caleb, “I understand.”

“No, you don’t understand at all,” said Jester, “I hate you but I don’t mean I _hate_ you, I mean I love you but _I hate you_.”

Caleb thought of kissing her horn, a fleet touch before he carted her back to the stairs and started shouting for Caduceus. But of course he had just burned her quite badly.

“Jester,” he said, “you may draw dicks on my face as I’m sleeping tonight.”

He shoved the door open. Jester said, “Do you mean it?”

“As many dicks as you want.”

“That’s a lot of dicks.”

“Everyone will point and laugh at me.”

“You wouldn’t like that.”

“Maybe not after breakfast.”

She took in a deep breath and they crossed, slowly, through the vast, dark, stone hall to the swooping stairway that led down again to the dungeon. There was a great deal of shouting down there, and untrustworthy laughing, some of it even the demon’s. 

Impulsively at the top of the stairs Caleb said, “You know, the Traveler, he believes in you.”

“He’s my best friend.”

“Not like—well. Yes. Like that. But he also… He sees everything that you do,” said Caleb. “And he…” The words were too much. They sat sourly in his throat and made him sour. He gave them up. 

“He will talk to you again soon,” said Caleb. 

Jester pulled away from him just enough so she might could squint along her nose at him. He scowled at her.

She smiled suddenly, quicksilver bright, and as suddenly gone again, leaving her looking oddly solemn as she said, “I don’t hate you, Caleb. You’re my best friend, too. Now can we please find Caduceus because the spot where you burned me hurts like a _lot_.”

“I did it for your own good.”

“Yes,” said Jester, “but I’m still going to give you shit for it.”

“Jester,” said Caleb dryly as they began hobbling down the stairs and into the usual hell, “you are such verwunderung.”

“Thank you,” said Jester, and added, “Gesundheit,” though she cringed terribly with every step.

**Author's Note:**

> We'll say she got dimension door up _before_ she got stabbed with lizard blood. (What a cool sentence! Wow!) I stole the ysalamir from Timothy Zahn's _Star Wars_ novels, because DnD didn't have the plot device I needed. Welcome to the jungle, baby.


End file.
